Conversation Piece

More positive developments:
So last night I had a conversation with Maggie. A full, actual, amazing conversation. The first one I may have ever had.

It started at dinner and went like this:

AJ: Are you enjoying your fried rice? Yes? Or No?
Maggie: Ess
AJ: Do You want more beef? Yes? Or No?
Maggie shakes her head
AJ: Maggie! That’s amazing? Do you want your water? Yes? Or No?
Maggie: Ess
AJ: Maggie! This is fantastic. Well, I think dinner’s over, do you want to get down? Yes or no?
Maggie: Ess
Then she spun her legs around off the chair, stood up and got down from the table.

This type of interchange continued for the better part of her bedtime ritual. Do you want to get in bed? Ess. Do you want to read a book? Ess. Do you need to sit on the potty? Shakes her head. So on and so forth. It was awesome.

If I had human emotions, I likely would have cried.

The main reason I can stay optimistic is because I’m impressed every day by the things that she can do that everyone tells us she wouldn’t be able to do. And this was really impressive.

And it’s not just us – this is from our speech therapist:
Hi Jenny,

That is so awesome. In my clinical experience, when I have overlapped my sessions with OT sessions, I have observed an increase in language some of the time. The reason being is that a sensory need had been met allowing the client to concentrate more on language.

Today, in my session, she said, “Wawa”, “sss” for “yes”, “ah” and a “ba” sound when working on verbally imitating “mom”.

For receptive directions, I used 3-D objects (or actual objects) in a field of 2 and Maggie correctly touched and/or grabbed the object asked for in 8/10 trials. It was great!